Sunday 18th
February 2007:
1.39pm. God, it feels like two months since my last entry - hardly one!
I suppose that that's good - it does mean I've been doing plenty of
living during the last month. Went to Liverpool, then Barcelona not long
after the last entry - both went very well. Once back here, studies
began again in earnest - a lot more coursework this semester than last,
I feel like second semester in second year (ie; this time last year)
where you have this mountain of work to do, and no matter how often you
attend to it, you are always feeling like the mountain is growing faster
than you can get through it. It's not a pleasant feeling - it's rather
like being in a room filling with water.

I think this was part of the feeling of being depressed much of this
past week. I was in quite a negative frame of mind, seeing how people
are constantly retreading old pointless patterns of behaviour and not
doing anything about it except to winge - due to this, I have ceased the
coffee date system completely as people had grown complacent. Rather
like myself I suppose. I also think that it's been quite some time since
I have had a clear 'win' - that article I mentioned last entry for
Resurgence
ended up getting heavily diluted down from the many thousands to
something far lighter which I've put onto my website
here.
While that was a form of accomplishment, it's nowhere near the original
article which is easily heading towards tens of thousands of pages. The
rather annoying thing is that like Tn, I know I can write it, it's just
I need this coursework off my back to do it. That feeling is so
reminiscent of first year - the feeling of doing pointless, worthless
crap to get this bit of paper and of all the vastly more productive
things I could be doing. I had thought in first year that it would have
improved by third & fourth year, but now I realise I was being
hopelessly optimistic. For example, in third year we are still
learning exactly the same Economics as first year - almost down
to the same topic each week - but now with extra "added maths". In
Management, they have caught up with my contemporary knowledge so now at
least they are teaching at a basic level what at least I am interested
in, but it's soooo basic - I find it frustrating to read papers
claiming things about the carbon cycle which last summer's research
proved to be totally specious. And I won't even begin on the
thermoeconomics (Buddhist Economics) papers (supposedly state-of-the-art
... what crap!) ...

My mood did improve noticeably yesterday though. In October, as part
of that shit storm, my laptop suddenly died and after a great deal of
testing I discovered that it was the electrical interface connecting the
hard drive. I recently bought a USB enclosure, stuck the hard drive into
it and after Friday and yesterday spent playing with the internals of
Windows, got my existing Windows installation to boot unmodified from
the USB hard drive. If I do say so myself, I am rather proud of myself
as according to Microsoft this is impossible. I have written up how I
did it
here.

So, today is entirely coursework. Most of next week looks like
entirely coursework. Nothing other than coursework. Hmm, now I'm feeling
depressed again. Time to make a start I guess ... be happy!